The motor racing series of your electric dreams is here. Since its inaugural season just three years ago, Formula E has increasingly given Formula One a run for its money, with wheel-to-wheel racing that is changing the game for electric cars on and off the track. GQ caught up with the DS Virgin Racing Team at the Monaco ePrix, where British driver Sam Bird, his teammate José María Lopéz, and tech experts Alex Tai and Sylvain Filippi gave us the lowdown on why Formula E is electrifying the four-wheeled world...

Formula E only races on street tracks

**Sam Bird, DS Virgin Racing driver: **We race on street tracks solely, and it’s the only championship that probably does that in the world. It’s exciting; it means that when you make a mistake, you are normally in a wall. You’ve got to be as close to the barriers as you humanly possibly can be. You also want to get the message across to the heart of the cities about electric vehicles and their importance in the future. There’s no point in going to a racetrack that’s 50 miles out of a city centre. The whole point is to have it in the centre where people can go and see it.

Formula E technology is revolutionising electric cars on the road

Alex Tai, Team Principal: In Formula E, we’re concentrating on drivetrain technology. This is the motors, the gearboxes, the converters – that’s what we’re developing here. We allow the manufacturers to compete against each other, and so they strive to become better, faster, more efficient, more reliable. That’s the effect it will have, getting a more effective, more powerful, more efficient, more affordable drivetrain in your car.

Electric cars are remarkably simple

Sylvain Filippi, DS Virgin Racing Chief Technical Officer: The beauty of electric cars is that they are truly much simpler than IC (internal combustion) engines. Hybrids are very complex because on hybrid cars you have a petrol engine, an electric motor and a battery and all these things must hold together. The pure electric vehicle is definitely the future. You have the battery (which is the equivalent of your fuel tank, where you store the energy) and what you need, simplifying it a little bit, is some electronics to convert the current from DC to AC, feed that into an electric motor and go directly into the wheels. So one small electric motor can replace all of an engine that you normally see. So you go from 300 moving parts to one moving part. That’s the beauty of an electric motor.

Formula E is quiet – but not necessarily for the drivers

Sam Bird: Actually in the car, it’s quite loud. It’s not quiet and it’s just wind, you do have whine from the motor and noise from the battery, so you do have that. You can hear other cars as well, I don’t think it’s that quiet. When there’s 20 cars all in close proximity, and you’re at that corner it’s quite noisy.

Formula E cars all look very similar, but it’s what’s inside that makes the difference

Sam Bird: Everybody has the same cockpit and everybody has the same battery technology – the battery is supplied by Williams, the chassis is supplied by Spark. Every manufacturer is allowed to use their own drivetrain, their own motors to power their drivetrains, choose whether you use one or two motors and how many gears – do you want five gears, four, three, two, one?

Formula E drivers have to change cars half way through the race (but not for much longer)

Sylvain Filippi: We could have done a quite short race, like 20 minutes or 30 minutes with only one car, but for many reasons we decided to do a race that is almost an hour. The technology three or four years ago when we started this championship was wouldn’t allow us to do that with one car. So basically it’s like a pitstop, but instead of changing tyres, we swap cars. We are now working very hard on our plans for Season Five, which is the latter end of 2018, when we will have one car per driver. So Season One was two cars per driver with 150kw – Season Five will be one car per driver at 200kw – more power and only one car.

Formula E has a support series called Roborace - and it’s completely driverless

José María Lopéz, DS Virgin Racing driver: People wonder what this means – does this mean that the future of racing is going to be without drivers? I think if you take away the drivers, it’s no longer a sport, but what they are trying to do with Roborace is to develop something that could be very useful for human beings in the future, the fact that cars can drive alone. Just think, that hour that you spend driving to work, you could be working. It is very interesting to see what a robot can do, but I think it is going to be a long, long time before a robot can be faster than a driver, because we can improvise and feel the car.

#FanBoost allows Formula E fans to give their favourite drivers more power

Alex Tai: If you like Sam Bird, you’re a fan of his and you are in China or in Sao Paolo or in Australia, wherever you are, what you can do is you can vote for them online and that might give them more power in the race. If you win the FanBoost, or if you’re one of the top three, you’ll get an extra boost.

Formula E has one of the most competitive driver line-ups in the world

Sam Bird: I love the competition. You look at this grid and actually one of the toughest grids in motorsport. I’d like to say, pound for pound it is the toughest, because of the driver line up and the cars. You look from the bottom of the grid to the top of the grid, it’s I think, stronger than Formula One in depth... We do a thing called the lottery draw for qualifying. There’s 20 drivers, there’s four groups so you get five drivers in each group. You want to have an easy group but there’s no such thing as an easy group! They’re all really hard, they’re all bloody hard.

José María Lopéz: It’s very strong. You have many ex-Formula One drivers, very talented young drivers and people who have succeeded in motor racing in many series. I think it’s one of the strongest fields you can have in a series today. I think more and more drivers want to come to Formula E.

Formula E is better for overtaking than Formula 1

Alex Tai: You’ve got 20 great drivers out there, and they’ve all got very, very similar technology and they have all got a very good chance of winning... It’s less predictable and it’s easier to pass. It’s a little bit difficult to get past in Formula 1 at the moment, because of the technology – when you get close to the car in front, it makes it very difficult to have an as efficient a car. In Formula E, because we don’t rely on aero downforce, you can get right up behind someone and that’s an advantage to you when you go past. So overtaking is easier in Formula E and it’s all about overtaking.